Renaissance Enslavements

This paper will address human bondage and its impact on Italian states and other polities in Mediterranean Europe from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. Adopting Moses Finley’s sociological model for classifying enslaving societies, historians have traditionally regarded the societies of early modern Europe as “societies with slaves,” as opposed to the “slave societies” that came into existence in the Atlantic world during this period. While it is generally assumed that practices of enslavement had profound implications for “slave societies,” until lately historical research has neglected the ramifications that enslavement practices had on societies assumed to belong to the category of “societies with slaves,” such as those of Renaissance Europe. Nonetheless, recent scholarship on other geographic regions, such as the late Ottoman Empire, has pointed to the importance of exposing the particularities of enslaving practices in those societies that have traditionally been categorized as “societies with slaves.” The paper will begin with charting the estimated scope of human bondage in Renaissance Italy and other Catholic polities in Mediterranean Europe, and examining the different typologies of enslavement that existed in this region. It will identify the major differences between enslavement in Mediterranean states and its evolution in the overseas colonies of European powers, but argue that there were also important similarities connecting the two systems of enslavement, as they evolved and transformed from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The second part of the paper will expound the reasons for historians’ enduring reluctance to acknowledge that enslavement was a key feature of urban (and sometimes also rural) life in some of the leading economic, political, and cultural centers with which we associate “Renaissance Europe.” Finally, it will delineate current trends in enslavement research that focus on early modern Italy and the broader Mediterranean region, and suggest fruitful directions for future research.